Tag: Timeline

Rory’s Birth Date

When Tristan shows Rory the party invitation he received from Emily, we can see that Rory was born on October 8.

This isn’t possible according to the script – Rory started school late, and she would only have been at Chilton for a short time by October 8, less than two weeks at the absolute maximum. Several weeks have now gone by, where Rory has attended multiple Friday Night Dinners, learned to play golf, helped out at a wedding, got her first D, failed to turn up in time for a big test, attended a cat’s wake, discovered her mother and English Literature teacher made a date, and confessed to Dean that she is interested in him. Furthermore, October 8 was a Sunday, not a Friday, in 2000.

If you carefully follow Rory’s adventures since starting at Chilton, you can see that her birthday would actually be October 27. A birthday in late October is confirmed in future seasons.

If you are in a nit-picky mood, feel free to join me in tut-tutting that the party invitation said that Rory was born in the morning twice in the same sentence, but neglected to mention that it’s her sixteenth birthday – no way would Emily have done such a shoddy job.

One might also wonder how Emily was able to get the names and addresses of all Rory’s classmates to send them invitations – did Headmaster Charleston let her access the school database just for her granddaughter’s birthday party?

Dinner with Emily

The episode opens with Lorelai and Rory having Friday Night Dinner with Emily; Richard is on a business trip to Germany. It is actually the evening of the same Friday that Rory missed the Shakespeare test in the previous episode, The Deer Hunters.

Later episodes will show Emily having a direct hotline to Chilton gossip through her friendship with Bitty Charleston, the headmaster’s wife. Yet Emily never brings up the fact that both Rory and Lorelai have thrown massive fits in the headmaster’s office that very day, and Rory was even sent home from school because of her behaviour.

Maybe her friendship with Bitty is not yet as close as it will be later, or Headmaster Charleston was unusually discreet about being yelled at by two Gilmores. For whatever reason, Lorelai seems to get away with it completely, and she has a rare escape from being chastised severely by her mother.

“I don’t have any clean clothes”

Being woken up at 7:10 am instead of 5:45 am sends Lorelai intoa panic. We learn that all her nice clothes are at the drycleaners, and she was planning to pick them up and get dressed in her blue suit with the flippy skirt before she took Rory to school. She fumbles through a drawer, then in the next scene she is hurrying downstairs dressed in cut off denim shorts, a pink tie-dyed tee-shirt, and cowboy boots – apparently the only clean clothes she has to wear.

The trouble is that she opens the closet and we see clothes hanging up in there. Maybe they’re not great clothes, but most of them would be better than going to Rory’s school dressed in denim cut-offs and boots. For that matter, why does she need to wear boots? You don’t send shoes to a dry-cleaner, so she should still have normal shoes to wear. And what time did she plan on going to the dry-cleaner anyway – Rory’s school day starts at around 8 am and it’s a half hour drive, so does the dry-cleaner in Stars Hollow open around 6.30 am?

It’s hard not to reach the conclusion that Lorelai had a very specific outfit in mind – the blue suit with the flippy skirt – and since she isn’t able to wear it due to her own poor time-management skills, is determined to wear something completely unsuitable in a fit of pique.